Re: [BKARTS] Indesign Vs Pagemaker

[Gerald Lange <Bieler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Harold

Gene Gable's latest article on Heavy Metal Madness takes a look at
composition using a modern page layout program (Quark Express 6.0) vs a
page set by hand. Food for thought.

http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/19876.html

IMHO: it's really not the software (no matter how advanced) that makes
for good typography, it's the typographer.

Gerald

I work with both on a day to day basis, and feel that Pagemaker is a toy
next to Indesign. I use Pagemaker when I have to, but I design in InDesign.
InDesign has many typographic advantages including a multi-line compositor,
a native Insert Glyph palette, a find-and-replace-font command, full
Opentype support, and lots of bells and whistles. There are simply more
typographic tools at your disposal. InDesign is more flexible because it
opens Quark files (albeit not reliably--but at least it sort of can) and its
PDF export is much more stable and reliable. On screen rendering of type
and images in Indy/OSX is superior to Pagemaker/OS9/ATM--they're crisper and
better defined.

There are upgrading issues to OSX, and your friend may encounter some bumps
in the road--make sure all your hardware and software is supported in OSX
first. Also, InDesign and OSX require much more memory and system resources.
It will be aggravatingly slower if you're running an older Mac. But
comparing the software head-to-head isn't fair...InDesign is a much more
professional way to go.

Hope this helps,
Harold

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